Living the Peace Testimony: The Legacy of Howard and Anna Brinton

Synopsis

Born of Quaker families, Howard Brinton and Anna Cox Brinton were to meet doing Friends relief work in Germany after World War I in Europe and devote their lives together to nurturing Quakerism, social activism, peacemaking and peacemakers from coast to coast in the United States and, in their last years, in Asia. Described by one Friend as “translucent teachers and ministers of life,” the Brintons lived the Quaker Peace Testimony as educators, as writers, as activists (particularly with the American Friends Service Committee), and as directors of Pendle Hill during its early years. Howard’s writings are integral to an understanding of the Quaker peace movement of the twentieth century and are no less relevant today, as Friends continue to seek the balance between their outward social activism and their inward spiritual life.

About the Author(s)

Anthony Manousos joined the Religious Society of Friends in 1985 and is currently editor of Friends Bulletin, the official publication of independent Western Quakers. The author has been involved in many Quaker projects. During the 1980s, he helped to edit a Quaker-inspired anthology of writings by Soviet and American writers called The Human Experience, which was jointly published in the United States and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1989. He described this effort at citizen diplomacy in the 1992 Pendle Hill pamphlet, Spiritual Linkage with Russians: the Story of a Leading.

In 1993, the author helped to start a youth service program in southern California and Mexico under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee and Southern California Quarterly Meeting. He has led youth and adults on service projects to Mexico and various other places. He has published numerous articles in Quaker magazines.

In 1971 Anthony earned a B.A. from Boston University, where he studied poetry with Anne Sexton, and in 1984, he earned a Ph.D. in British literature from Rutgers University, where he studied with Paul Fussell. He has taught at various colleges and universities and published many academic articles. Anthony and his wife, Kathleen Ross, a Methodist minister whom he met at Pendle Hill, currently live in Torrance, California. Anthony can be reached at friendsbulletin@aol.com.

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